Doctor Strange: Another Origin Movie?

My first impression of the trailer for Doctor Strange was “wow, this looks just like Batman Begins”. Cue the murdered parents!

By then I was already excited by the casting of Benedict Cumberbatch, an amazing actor who can do the part justice. Ditto on Tilda Swinton so I’ve no arguments there either. The issue may be: is this another origin story where we learn all about the character & nothing actually happens until the second or third installment of the franchise?

Yes, it’s important for the audience to understand a hero’s motives: what drives him/her, how did they get their powers and/or training, their history with the villain, why should we care for these characters?

But, come on, we see hero movies to see excellent costumes, amazing powers and fight scenes, not 2 hours of time-lapsed training building up to 15 minutes of conflict which is nothing more than a teaser for the next film, or two, or five.

Wait, did I just type “excellent costumes”? Well, Doctor Strange gets a check in the “yes” column on that! Whereas many recent films and shows have tried to modernize comic heroes’ costumes to look like they’d actually be walking about in a crowd (why, Scarlet Witch? WHY??????), check out this epic ridiculousness from the stills! Looking good!

Another check in the yes column is it looks like someone is finally using “Inception technology” for the greater good. This film is perfect for these effects, which is phenomenal outside of the fact that Inception took a huge beating from fans.

Here’s hoping we get some more action and less build-up this time.

Closing statement: I’m starting a petition to ban Uncle Ben or the Waynes to be shown dying again for at least 20 years. Seriously, it’s laughable. Oh, there go the pearls again…..

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They certainly seem to be cranking them out. It’s a double-edged sword: the popularization of comic book movies means cookie cutter movies until audiences move on to another genre, but it also means more movies about subjects I like. Comic book movies have definitely changed course for mass appeal with the exception of the X-Men franchise (let’s pretend “The Wolverine” never happened).

Sadly there will be parallels to Batman Begins for sure, because the screenwriter of that movie had written no less than two Doctor Strange scripts beforehand and obviously did use some of this work for Batman Begins. It is so much a Doctor Strange origin story in the beginning, it’s not even funny.
But I doubt that Marvel will linger on this, they will want to get to the stunning visuals as fast as possible.